me burning the dead body?”
“It’s possible …” Wasn’t it?
He shook his head. “I made love to you all night.” His voice dropped even lower so that it was just a rough whisper as he added, “Over and over again.”
Those images flitted through her mind again—their naked bodies intimately entwined, their mouths fused together. Their hearts beating in the same frantic rhythm. So many images had haunted her over the past few years, staying as vivid as if they’d just made love hours—not years—ago.
Would he have had time to commit those horrific crimes and make love to her so thoroughly?
“I never left you,” he insisted. “You left me.”
“I left you that morning,” she admitted. When she had awakened in his bed, in his arms, she’d slipped out of his loose grasp and hurriedly dressed. She hadn’t been able to believe what she’d done—how she’d given in to her desires to spite her pride. After he’d dumped her before leaving for Afghanistan, she never should have trusted him with her body or her heart. “But you’d left me first—more than a year before.”
“I got deployed.”
“You left me before you got deployed,” she reminded him. “You didn’t want me waiting for you.” And, haunted by all the years she’d spent waiting for someone she loved to come back for her, she had readily agreed to end their budding relationship even though—or maybe because—she had already fallen for him.
“We’d only gone out a few times before I got called back to active duty,” he reminded her. “I couldn’t ask you to wait for me.”
“Yes, you could have.” Then, even if she hadn’t been able to agree to wait, she would have at least known that he cared about her, too. “But you told me that you didn’t see us working out anyway. That we weren’t really compatible.”
And she had believed him … until she’d seen his face when he had returned and found her in Brandon’s office, wearing his ring. She had been trying to give it back that day, too. She’d only gone out with his business partner a few times over the year Jed had been gone, and mostly just so she could ask about Jed. So she had been using Brandon as a connection to the man she really wanted. That was why she had let him talk her into wearing that ring to think about his proposal—because she’d felt guilty.
“I was lying then,” Jed said.
“I didn’t know that. I believed that you really didn’t see any future for us,” she said. And that was why she had felt like a fool when she’d awakened in his arms. What if he’d only been jealous of his friend and hadn’t really cared about her at all? Because if he had, how had he dropped her so easily?
Just as easily as her parents had dropped her at Aunt Eleanor’s and never returned despite all their promises …
“Is that why you didn’t come forward to offer me an alibi?” he asked. “Because you wanted revenge over my dumping you before I left for Afghanistan?”
She sucked in a breath. Apparently he didn’t think very highly of her at all. When he’d told her that he saw no future for them, he must have been telling the truth then. And he was lying now, to try to make her feel guilty enough to help him.
“I have told you,” she said, “again and again that I did come forward. I talked to your lawyer.”
Jed shook his head, once again rejecting her claim. “Marcus swore to me that he never found you.”
“Then he lied.”
And, she thought, if Marcus really had lied to his friend and former fraternity brother, he would have had no qualms about lying to a woman he had barely known. Had Marcus lied about everything? Jed’s guilt? His violent temper?
After that first initial jolt of fear at realizing she had let Jed into her apartment, she hadn’t remained afraid—if she had, she would have tried to get to the phone or she would have shouted for her neighbor to call the police. Of course she would have had to shout really loud for Mrs. Osborn to hear her, but the elderly lady definitely would have come to her aid.
But instinctively she had known that she was in no real danger from Jed—that he wouldn’t physically harm her or their daughter. He may have had reason to harm her, though, had she stupidly believed lies about him …
Jed’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand … why would he lie?”
“He thought you were guilty,” she divulged. “He said that Afghanistan changed you—that you came back so angry and violent.”
A muscle twitched along his jaw, as if he tightly clenched it—controlling that rage of which his friend had warned her. “Was I violent with you that night?”
“From what I remember …?” She bit her lip and shook her head. He had been anything but violent. He had definitely been passionate but gentle, too.
“So I didn’t rape you.”
“No, but I was drugged. I don’t care if the results came too late. I know that something wasn’t right that night. I felt dazed or drunk, and I’d had nothing but that water at the office.” At the time, she’d thought it had just been the surrealness of finally making love with the man she had loved for so long and had worried that, because of his deployment, she would never have had the chance to be that close to him.
Jed nodded, almost as if he was beginning to accept that what she told him was the truth.
“My memory of that night is sporadic,” she continued. “I can testify that I was with you that night, but I can’t swear that you never left me. Your lawyer was right that I wouldn’t have been a convincing alibi—that my testimony could have actually hurt you more than I could have helped you.”
And that was why she hadn’t gone to the police, despite the twinges of guilt she’d felt over staying silent. While she believed that a man should be punished for his crimes, she hadn’t wanted to help dole out that punishment. Not to Jed—not given what he might have endured in Afghanistan.
According to his lawyer, there had been more than sufficient evidence for his conviction without her muddying the waters. But would she have muddied the waters, or had Leighton already done that?
His broad shoulders slumped, and his breath shuddered out in a ragged sigh. “I spent all these years thinking that all I had to do to clear my name was find you.”
“Is that really all you want?” To clear his name—not to kill her? If she could have been his alibi but hadn’t come forward, she wouldn’t blame him for wanting to harm her.
He glanced toward the hall down which was his daughter’s room. “That was all I wanted.”
“To clear your name?”
“I am innocent, Erica,” he insisted, his voice and gaze steady with sincerity. “I didn’t kill anyone. Not in Afghanistan and damn well not when I returned.”
Guilt gripped her heart, making it ache. Had she been wrong? Had she stood by and done nothing while an innocent man rotted in prison? “But there was the witness—the one who actually
